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I consider myself a free speech absolutist. Or very nearly so. But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) spe

I consider myself a free speech absolutist. Or very nearly so. But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything. In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent their way. Today it's the centralized websites that also don't have this obligation. If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it. You can host your own video if you'd like, or maintain a personal blog site.* You are not entitled to widespread distribution. Never have been. * Which leads to a place where I'll agree on obligations: root infrastructure like DNS or network connectivity. Those are the common carriers of our Internet.

rexpop 8y ago
I don't understand your position. The 1A is fulfilled—in word and spirit—to your satisfaction so long as government puts up no barriers to speech, even if private, quasi-monopolistic firms filter speech to their own ends?
- function_seven 8y ago
  I think you do understand it, yeah. The only caveat to that is the private control of what I believe to be public infrastructure. The wires that connect all of us.
  - gpm 8y ago
    What makes the wire public infrastructure and facebook not? What would facebook have to do to become public infrastructure, or comcast have to do to become not?
    - ellard 8y ago
      One is contracted by the US government to provide public infrastructure (and AFAIK still hasn't fulfilled their end of the agreement), and the other is an entity that operated and grew organically to provide a service that the government didn't ask for.
      - gpm 8y ago
        Is google fiber (which, afaik, was not contracted by the government) private infrastructure in your model then? (Both yes and no are certainly valid answers, I'm just curious about how you view this)
        ellard 8y ago
        I don't know what Google's contracts and agreements are with local municipality, so the short version of my answer is that I don't know how i'd classify Google Fiber myself. For a more general point of view, i'd take into account a lot of factors such as: - who "owns" the service, both from an "on paper" POV and who builds and maintains it - what does the contracts between the entity and the government say - did the government pay for a service to be built by the entity, vs the entity asked for permission to build the service, vs the entity built the service using non-government-permission-required resources - what was the spirit of the relationship between the entity and the government - who will be using the service - is the service a government-allowed monopoly - etc. Facebook does pass some of those tests (eg. the "public at large" is the target userbase for it), but fail a lot of the other tests at least in how they operate in the United States. Comcast's general laying out of wire + offering services over that wire passes a lot more of those tests and puts the service into public infrastructure in most folks' eyes. edit: formatting
      - Chris_Chambers 8y ago
        It doesn’t matter if it grew organically. All large social media companies should be nationalized and required to prioritize the first amendment above everything else. This nationalization should be done on principle alone as a precaution, not as a punishment. The prior owners can be happily compensated with billions from US taxpayers. Anyone should be happy to receive such an amount if it means they get to retire early, and anyone upset about it clearly had a sinister agenda to hide. Something like this will happen before 2024. I’m glad no one will see my unreadably gray comment, I’d hate to ruin the surprise.
    - 0xffff2 8y ago
      Comcast can't do anything to no longer be public infrastructure. Rather, municipalities would have to rework their regulations to allow anyone that follows a defined process to install the same infrastructure that Comcast has. Likewise, Facebook would become public infrastructure when the government puts regulations in place that make it impossible or prohibitive to start a new social media site.
      - gpm 8y ago
        That's an interesting perspective! How do patents interact with it? If facebook got a patent on some new VR technology that allowed face to face interaction at a distance, and didn't license it out, would that turn the relevant portion of facebook into public infrastructure? What if they licensed it out but only to other people who also won't serve people saying <x>?
    - lgeorget 8y ago
      Clearly not a definitive answer but some elements to think about: Facebook's business consists in promoting some of the content their users put online (the content that makes them win money) so they cannot claim to be a neutral carrier. Comcast cannot be asked to filter content since what they carry is encapsulated at least and encrypted most of the time.
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      You could compare it to the street vs a private hall - everyone has the right to walk on the street, but not to automatic admittance to private venues. Now the problem is that social networks in many respect fill the old function of the 'town square' which was a common area accessible to everyone. That commons area has effectively been divided up in the name of capitalism, in parallel to the Enclosure Acts which destroyed the British commons, so now we have a large number of (private) platforms instead. There are of course protocols don't suffer from this problem of private capital and monopolistic control, but (like land for the commons) protocols without infrastructure can't compete effectively against platforms' huge network effects. The practical upshot of this is that extremist groups will usually just head for other less discriminating platforms, eg there's a lot of white supremacists on Vkontakte (though I'm not sure how this will pan out if Russia rearranges its internet connectivity with the rest of the world).
- mieseratte 8y ago
  "Free Speech" != 1A
  - falcrist 8y ago
    Exactly. Freedom of speech isn't just freedom from government censorship. Other entities can infringe on it.
    - XorNot 8y ago
      And when you're in my house around my children you absolutely do not have it.
      - falcrist 8y ago
        Right. Freedom of speech logically cannot be unlimited for everyone at all times. That's why government protections of freedom of speech tend to be limited in scope.
- mises 8y ago
  His position was that government should not stifle speech, but that a private company should not be forced to re-print it. There's a big difference between prohibition/regulation and coercion of speech.
marcoperaza 8y ago
I think the interesting case is the presence of a monopolist (and I take no position here as to whether any particular company is a monopoly or not). Other [classically] liberal principles like freedom of contract have been abrogated in such cases, largely out of the realization that competition and choice are what generally make such private exercises of power acceptable.
- dantheman 8y ago
  Like a newspaper deciding what to publish?
  - djsumdog 8y ago
    There was a time in history where everyone could start a newspaper. Pre civil war in the US, the modern day price of a printing press was $10k and almost everyone in a town would buy papers and take them on a journey across America. That's how information spread back then. By WWI, the cost in today's dollars for a newspaper grew to several million. People can't live off small papers today. They live off Patreon and YouTube. They depend on distribution platforms in a way we didn't before. If Amazon bans your books, it's effective censorship for people who only read eBooks. Sure you can distribute the epub/mobi DRM free, but few people are going to bother with that (or know what to do with the file). I've written about this before: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-...
    - xyz0 8y ago
      What? The reason starting a newspaper became so expensive is because of a much larger, national distribution model. You're still free to buy a $10k printer and sell newspapers in your hometown. If it doesn't contain hateful, violent rhetoric, you can even advertise it on Facebook! If Amazon bans your books, you can still buy the book elsewhere, or get it from the author's site. Just because a piece of information isn't in the medium that you prefer to consume doesn't make it "censorship." It's not on Amazon that "few people are going to bother with that" when they ban you for violating their ToS.
bilbo0s 8y ago
>But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything... This! A thousand times THIS! People seem to think that free speech absolutists were saying that Facebook should be forced to host extremist content. For my part, I wasn't saying anything of the sort. Facebook has rights too, and as a free speech absolutist, I will jealously defend Facebook's rights as vigorously as I defend the rights of the Nazi/Confederate/whatever you want to call them. (I think I agree with you on the "almost all" part though, because I do think pedophilia should be stamped out wherever we find it. But that's just MY line in the sand. Others may draw the line somewhere else.)
- sparkie 8y ago
  Facebook and others are not responsible for what their users upload and enjoy the legal protection that comes from it. If they decide that they are going to be curators of content on their platforms, they are no longer a mere service provider, but a publisher. They might find those protections vanish, which would more or less destroy their platform.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  You're misunderstanding (or deliberately misrepresenting) what free-speech absolutists are saying. Nobody is saying that Facebook should be "forced" to host any particular content, any more than anybody is saying that homedepot.com should be forced to host any particular content. What we are saying is that Facebook is no longer a platform for free and open exchange of idea and is engaging in censorship - and it's open season to point out that everything that they _don't_ censor (e.g. calls for violence against politically unprotected groups) is something that they explicitly condone.
  - _dczq 8y ago
    ==What we are saying is that Facebook is no longer a platform for free and open exchange of idea and is engaging in censorship== When was this ever not the case? Violent imagery and sexual nudity are already not allowed.
hhs 8y ago
Based on the evolution of the web, indeed, it looks like new businesses will be made out of this. With this banned group, I am concerned about what social scientists call the 'backfire effect', where beliefs turn even stronger and bolder. For instance, this happens with groups of people who hold conspiracy theories; when society rejects them, the conspiracy theorists double-down on their beliefs.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  Good luck to them
- amiga-workbench 8y ago
  I think you're right. Every time you censor something you create market pressures for a way to host content that's more difficult to be taken down or traced back to a source. It's why I think censorship is self defeating, it will eventually lead to a populace being competent enough with certain tools to side step the censor, and you can't walk that back.
- moosingin3space 8y ago
  The key thing you're missing is recruitment. White supremacists need access to the larger platforms in order to recruit new adherents to their bigoted ideology, which is significantly harder to do if they're forced into "underground" spaces. De-platforming works -- if we make it clear that hateful ideology isn't tolerated in large platforms, then people have to actively seek out such ideologies. If such ideologies are already frowned upon in the public sphere, it makes their recruitment much more difficult.
  - hhs 8y ago
    Totally agree, recruitment will be much more difficult. It's what happens to many conspiracy theorists over time. Their recruitment takes the hit in society.
  - gjs278 8y ago
    The key thing you're missing is recruitment. Gloabalists need access to the larger platforms in order to recruit new adherents to their bigoted ideology, which is significantly harder to do if they're forced into "underground" spaces. De-platforming works -- if we make it clear that hateful ideology isn't tolerated in large platforms, then people have to actively seek out such ideologies. If such ideologies are already frowned upon in the public sphere, it makes their recruitment much more difficult.
Inu 8y ago
"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech." - Noam Chomsky
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- Veraticus 8y ago
  Facebook and YouTube are private corporations and have no obligation to platform any idea. They have the freedom to remove any content on their platforms they like, and your freedom of speech doesn't trump theirs. Of course, you can continue saying whatever it is you like -- you just have to find a platform for it yourself.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Essentially. A person's freedom of speech doesn't imply curtailment of another person's freedom of the press.
  - deleted 8y ago
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- bjt2n3904 8y ago
  Thank you. Free speech isn't just an amendment for the government, it's a principle for society. If Facebook were a television station with limited air time for a single track, it would be perfectly valid for them to decide (reasonably) who gets air time. However, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have infinite tracks and time. I don't think the OPs argument is as strong, with that in mind.
  - deleted 8y ago
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walrus01 8y ago
I am in agreement with you on this point. FB isn't obligated to give anyone a publishing platform. People with hateful, racist rhetoric are can certainly attempt to fully self host their shit content on their own servers. Essentially all they need to do is figure how how to run their own authoritative DNS servers, and their own http daemons. Various publishing CMS that work on a common LAMP stack server are GPL/BSD licensed and require no external connections to any platform services. Hopefully, ethical ISPs will refuse to host their VMs or dedicated servers, so they'll have a bit of a harder task to find a publishing platform. But if you spend 30 seconds googling "russia VPS" you can find VM services which don't even disconnect customers for hosting virus/worm/trojan/botnet command and control sites, so the racists can go there.
vokep 8y ago
I see what you mean, but it does seem different because FB or YouTube are not publications, but public forums, public communication spaces to publish as a person. Things published on youtube are not on behalf of youtube. Basically FB and Youtube and things like it form space where content fills in.
- xkjkls 8y ago
  > Things published on youtube are not on behalf of youtube Tell that to people using YouTube. YouTube will end up being inextricably tied to whatever content is uploaded using their platform as long as they are the ones who manage its display and recommendations.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    I think a better retort would be "tell that to 4chan".
jeffdavis 8y ago
"also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience" On social media, don't you need to find your own audience?
cortic 8y ago
>No company or platform owes them anything. This is discrimination of opinion, strange as that sounds. There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments. Its because its not allowed, we either have a list of protected groups - or a general rule that forbids banning anyone because of their 'group'. If we don't fairly quickly extend free speech into these platforms, then we will have to eventually legislate a list of protected opinions.
- theseatoms 8y ago
  > There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments. Could you imagine the immediate public backlash against this type of behavior by a private establishment? I don't think the law is doing the heavy lifting here.
  - stronglikedan 8y ago
    There's plenty of places where there would be zero public backlash for those types of signs, if they were permitted by law.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    May I suggest reviewing the history of the civil rights movement? That sort of discrimination used to be normal in large parts of the US and was overcome through a combination of civil disobedience and legal challenges.
  - Thriptic 8y ago
    The supreme court heard a court case in 2014 in which a business refused to serve people because they were gay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora... A large number of people are still alive back from when Jim Crow laws were still actively in effect. In 1957 the president had to send the 101st airborne to Arkansas to escort black children to school and seized control of the state's national guard because they were being used to block desegregation of schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine A non-trivial percentage of Americans would love to have these signs up and are kept from doing so by the law. The women's movement, LGBT rights, and minority rights are actually a fairly new thing, and are still not without controversy in the US.
ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
The paradox of tolerance is that we must always be intolerant of the intolerant. You are always FOR free speech until the speech starts hurting you. ie would you be tolerant of isis posting on FB?
- r_smart 8y ago
  Yes, so long as they aren't breaking the incitement to violence clause.
- Fins 8y ago
  This alleged "paradox" is just a convenient sledgehammer with which those in power can hit the powerless over the head to keep them quiet.
  - ls612 8y ago
    No, it’s a solution to the problem that if you are tolerant of everything someone will eventually whack you with a sledgehammer. To avoid that you don’t tolerate those who are violently intolerant, which in the US takes the form of the “Imminent lawless action” doctrine.
    - Fins 8y ago
      That, actually, has nothing to do with that BS "paradox" and well predates it. Indeed, you can't do illegal things, and inflicting violence on others is generally illegal. What the "paradox" is used for is to silence those with inconvenient opinions -- if you've followed discussions of the Damore affair, "paradox" has been trotted out as justification for "punching him in the face" multiple times. But on the other hand, to use the simplest example, US is quite tolerant of speech (in the 1st amendment sense) and hasn't turned into communist or other dictatorship. USSR, or China, or Nazi Germany on the other hand did not tolerate any "intolerance" -- that did not turn out too well.
      - anigbrowl 8y ago
        Indeed, you can't do illegal things, and inflicting violence on others is generally illegal. If someone is consistently threatening violence at some point you need to make the determination about how to deal with that. You can of course do nothing about it but if the person eventually goes ahead and commits violence you now have a bunch of injured or dead people, which seems a worse ill to me than deplatforming.
yummybear 8y ago
Counterpoint - if every media, platform or provider blocks the content, and the only audience you're allowed to speak freely to, is to yourself - is it still "free speech"? I'm not saying we're there yet, but we could be at some point.
- XorNot 8y ago
  You literally have the right to go stand on an actual soapbox outside your government offices and yell at people. That's what's constitutionally protected. No one has to pay attention though.
deleted 8y ago
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908087 8y ago
Would you be similarly comfortable with ISPs or cell service providers censoring views they disagree with?
dpq 8y ago
I think your attitude is still extremely mild. It doesn't matter if we believe ourselves to be neutral, there are groups that consider themselves our opponents, and will work against everything we stand for. And, unless we decide to fight back or at least stop helping them to promote their agenda (which is often incompatible with values widely shared among secular / educated communities), they will prevail in some manner. See also: 2016 U.S. election.
- azangru 8y ago
  > to promote their agenda > ... > they will prevail in some manner. As it takes two to tango, so does it take two sides to promote something: one that is doing the promotion and the other that is following the promoter. If the argument is that people are so fickle they will eat up whatever is being directed at them, join the ranks of the promoters, who will thus prevail, then woe upon us. I prefer to think of ourselves as somewhat more capable of resisting insane and malicious messages.
conanbatt 8y ago
Thats fine, but how does the line blur when Facebook takes government money in the form of subsidies and political ads?
erentz 8y ago
> * Which leads to a place where I'll agree on obligations: root infrastructure like DNS or network connectivity. Those are the common carriers of our Internet. And payment processors, and credit card companies, and mobile carriers, and instant messaging providers.
- ryukafalz 8y ago
  I’d agree with all of those except instant messaging providers. The others involve massive capital investments to replace them at all; a small IM server can be run on a $5 VPS.
closeparen 8y ago
The town library is not required to carry every book. Librarians make curation decisions; that is what we pay them for. It is still a tragedy when small groups of activist Puritanical community members get enough political leverage to remove the books they don’t like. The reason it’s a tragedy is not unrelated to “free speech.”
asabjorn 8y ago
Why do they have the right to use power to suppress viewpoint opponents with 100% flexibility in claiming an individual has wronged a group with no evidence, no clear definition of what the terms are, and no recourse? It seems like terms like this and hate speech often boil down to “people that are effective at calling out my bullshit”. It is unethical to with no evidence call republicans or classical liberals Nazis, and then use that as a justification to abuse your power to shut them up. Why not make an argument instead? On this topic I really recommend Frankfurts [1] terse one hour read arguing that there are three types of statements; attempt at truth, attempt at lies, and attempt to just bullshit people with no regard to relate it to truth. This kind of attempt fall in the third category. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946 https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122...
- asabjorn 8y ago
  It is quite telling how this is getting downvoted with no argument. Always judge people on their actions, and especially how their actions impose upon others. Edit: and then this is also downvoted with no argument. A better demonstration of why this facebook policy is a terrible idea could have not happened.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    It's not a novel argument, it begs the question from the outset (boil down to “people that are effective at calling out my bullshit”), and ignores objective evidence about the content and aims of the speech in question.
    - asabjorn 8y ago
      Bullshitting is what many talking heads do on TV, YouTube and tumbler to generate content required for their job. Basically, truth seeking has not done its job on it so the person doesn’t know if it’s true or not. People are right now most often in a biased content bubble and judging content from what they learn by emotionally mistaking what they learn from possibly bullshit content as objective might lead to injustice. Most of us agree that people might say bad things and that it would be great if they didn’t, but my claims was that facebooks judgement of the content is unlikely to be objective because: 1) no clear definition of terms like white nationalism and hate speech is a recipe for bias. What liberal or republican haven’t been called a alt-right/Nazi at this point? 2) because of #1 there is a risk that a company that has a clear ideological tilt will most likely end up suppressing viewpoint opponents when the definitions are unclear, because too much is up to subjective judgement and no due process protects against these biases 3) no recourse is bad when things go wrong In due process it’s the process that reduce bias so that we don’t get the mistakes of mobs of the past (eg people that think they are objective while not having an accurate mental model of what they judge), although it can’t eliminate it. How do you think facebook has ameliorated these concerns so that they can be objective?
wang_li 8y ago
The question here isn't whether Facebook/Twitter/etc. have a right to control what is on their platform, they absolutely do. The question is whether there should be safe harbor provisions that protect them from legal repercussions of what they do choose to allow on their sites. A case can be made to protect someone who allows all comers, who increases the reach of the public to communicate with each other, and who extends the scope of public discourse to be protected from the legal consequences of what their users say. The same case is a lot harder to apply to an institution that curates the content they choose to publish. By way of comparison, telephone carriers, an industry that exerts no editorial control, are largely not legally liable for what customers say over the phone network. Newspaper publishers, who have absolute editorial control, on the other hand are legally responsible for what they publish. Which of these are Facebook and Twitter? My answer is that the more they limit speech that is not legally criminal then the more liability they should have for what they allow.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  The problem is that, for a paper or a TV network, control scales. You can pump your network TV signal out twice as many antennas, and still control every frame of video. For the telephone network, control does not scale. There is no way for the phone company to censor what happens in one billion daily phone calls. It can't be done (until we get adequate speech recognition, but that's not an answer that I want to see applied in this way). Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are like the phone company, not like newspapers and TV. Censorship does not scale. Twitter, being text, could think about trying to automate censorship. The problem is that people do all kinds of typos, circumlocutions, innuendo, and dog whistles to get around such things. Words are really flexible, so it's a hard problem. Facebook and YouTube are worse. They can try to have automatic assists, but pretty much the only way it can be done is via user reporting. Even that doesn't scale all that well.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
I tend to agree. I think the main argument against that can be made is that the Internet is now so complex that the forbidden speech can easily be silenced entirely, if you start your own blog independent of FB. Especially with DDoS attacks, it can become prohibitively expensive to stop those and the core/root internet infrastructure simply doesn’t stop it. It’s basically a paid add-on and if you want to do it yourself you will need both funding and/or technical expertise. Either way, I’m still in support of Facebook and others removing this type of speech as I think it’s a net negative to society to amplify it in this day of discovery algorithms. Seems like we also need to do more to improve the core infrastructure so that you don’t need 5Tbps of bandwidth to keep your blog online.
threatofrain 8y ago
Similarly, Fox News isn't required to carry content they don't want to, and their political reach is enormous.
- txsoftwaredev 8y ago
  And CNN, MSNBC, Vox, HuffPost, Slate, The Guardian etc. are not required to carry content that doesn't align with their political agenda. I'm not sure I understand your point? With media outlets there are plenty of alternatives. There are no direct alternatives to Facebook that provide the same services at that scale and reach.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    Why do scale and reach matter?
1000units 8y ago
This is obviously part of a much larger campaign to silence disagreeable speech. You aren't a "free speech absolutist" if you aren't alarmed by this. You admit that people have a right to use of "root infrastructure", but registrars and hosts are already discriminating against people for legally protected speech. PS: Observe the downvotes without comment. These are the adherents to the school of thought that advocates not caring about reasoning with people who disagree with you. Everything is simply a bare power struggle in which considerate words are not the weapons of choice.
Not_a_pizza 8y ago
> If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it. Will they get rid of Mark Zuckerberg? If there is any single bigot driving that company into the ground with both illegal practices and bigotry, it's him.
ineedasername 8y ago
> No company or platform owes them anything. Precisely. I worked on a college newspaper. It was common , had been going on for years and years in face, that a specific hate group would send an order for advertisements, and threaten to sue if we didn't print them. They were usually Holocaust denial ads w/ anti-semitic conspiracy theories. We never printed them, but some schools inevitably did, failing to understand this aspect of free speech. Everyone gets to speak. But if you want a microphone, you have to buy or build it yourself.
- alexandre_m 8y ago
  Bad example. The college newspaper acts as an editor and has to review what content to publish before it's being published. The college will be held responsible if there's misinformation or something of criminal nature being shared. FB pretends to be a medium of information for anyone and they don't moderate what is being published before being published. They do however have an obligation for content being distributed after if it's breaking the ToS or the laws. They have to take that down after the fact. Here the controversy as I see it, is to prevent a group from publishing if it's been labeled as "hate", or "white supremacist" content, where the labeling aspect is very subjective and arbitrary. Who's to decide the labeling?
  - ineedasername 8y ago
    > The college will be held responsible if there's misinformation or something of criminal nature being shared. This is precisely the dynamic that is driving facebook. I don't think the comparison to a newspaper is perfect, but I do think it's apt. In both cases, neither venue is obligated to give anyone their own soapbox to stand on. That was my point.
    - alexandre_m 8y ago
      The problem with FB is they want all the benefits of a platform without any of the drawbacks. Or rather, it's the public perception of what FB should be and FB is stuck in the middle juggling with politics. Obviously if you're a shareholder then you want to play it cool with the medias and portray a good image of the company. I just think it's bad policy.
marricks 8y ago
I agree with the spirit of this totally, if I run a coffee shop I sure as heck would kick out white nationalists and would support other coffee shops having that ability. There’s a weird side to this though that if you want to host a video let’s say YouTube is the place for it. Or if you want to organize a group Facebook is THE place for it. Well what if your group is about shutting down Facebook? Facebook could close it. Heck FB took down Elizabeth Warren’s post critiquing FB. I think these mega corps need to be broken up so they don’t get so much power in deciding what is and isn’t allowed on the internet. Sure they make good choices like this one but they also make tons of other choices that are only because it benefits them.
- JonesWilly 8y ago
  I like your comment, I only disagree with the word "spirit". I believe this policy is a slippery slope. No one likes these groups but alienating them, creates a precedent/a policy that legitimizes removal of the one element of our existence that allows for our individuality(spirit). Silence of that which we loathe is failure to embrace our own capacity for loathsome behavior. We all like and dislike different elements in our life. I am a married man; is this not discriminatory to the rest of society. When a corporate entity profits this much off the indoctrination of public, they should be obligated to enforce the tenants of said republic. “It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.” “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,
ataturk 8y ago
Why now? After all, we've had all this supposed white supremacist content available all these years and now it's somehow a threat? Are more white people getting fed up being the tax cows of the world or what?
superkuh 8y ago
You're right. The correct solution is for everyone to stop using the services providing by companies when they begin the downwards censorship slide. Unfortunately most people value using facebook in the >$1000/year range.
prepend 8y ago
What about the post office refusing to deliver letters? Or the phone company? How about no heat for nazis from the gas company? It using the gas company’s platform to heat your racist meeting place allowed? Facebook is a Privately Owned Public Place more than it is a platform.
justinmchase 8y ago
I think if they allow public signups then they should not have the ability to censor anybody, except by court order or to comply with the laws of the users region. Because of course "anything I don't agree with is hitler" is a problem and an inevitability. Its fine if they do not allow public sign ups and all people they are publishing are considered employees or enter into contract with the company but facebook, twitter etc. are different animals and I really don't see how anybody supporting free speech can support facebook inhibiting the speech of certain people.
- simias 8y ago
  By doing that you're effectively turning these websites into 4chan. Can you imagine a website like Hacker News if no moderation was possible, nobody could get banned and nothing could be removed without a court order? You'd just have every thread spammed by bots. That's the problem with unmoderated online discourse, cheap inflammatory posts are easy to make and draw a lot of attention while in-depth analysis takes time to write and to read. Why bother coming up with a clever retort if you can just spam "no u" and "fuck off" until those people are driven away? In my experience no moderation doesn't result in more varied opinions, instead it turns into an echo chamber where the bullies take over. Again, look at 4chan or some of the most popular, less moderated subreddits. It's pretty crap.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    The ideal state of affairs is when you can have multiple platforms, moderated in different ways as they compete for customers in a free (i.e. competitive) market, where such moderation, or lack thereof, is a part of their pitch to new customers. But we let companies monopolize whole segments of the market. And then every such segment becomes a vast echo chamber of whatever the prevailing public opinion at the moment is.
cynoclast 8y ago
>I consider myself a free speech absolutist. Or very nearly so. You're not. You're a coward.
beat 8y ago
I am no longer a free speech absolutist. And the reason I am not is the sort of abstract, angels-on-a-pinhead bullshit arguments that fill the responses to the parent post. The more it can be abstracted to "free speech", the less oxygen there is for discussion of the real harm caused by white supremacist thought and white supremacist actions. I put the safety of society at large first. And if you think that's oppressing you, maybe you should ask yourself why.
- dqpb 8y ago
  Who do you propose gets to decide what speech is dangerous?
  - beat 8y ago
    That's a disingenuous question. Let me come back with some questions about your question. Are you proposing that nobody can decide what speech is dangerous? Are you suggesting there is no such thing as dangerous speech? Are you suggesting that having someone decide what speech is dangerous is actually worse than the dangerous speech itself? If you're not suggesting any of these things, then how do you get out of the proposition that someone has decide?
    - gjs278 8y ago
      there is no such thing as dangerous speech
    - dqpb 8y ago
      It's not disingenuous - it's the most fundamental question that needs to be answered if you propose speech be controlled. > how do you get out of the proposition that someone has to decide I agree ultimately some subset of people would need to decide. My question is who?
      - XorNot 8y ago
        You clearly have done answer in mind since you've already conceded the core argument. Who do you think? I'm good with the discourse between the public and Facebook leadership in so far as it targets widespread social norms and ignores the few loudmouths.
grawprog 8y ago
I'm going to respond to this comment because my response is just kind of in general to the whole conversation this spawned. In what way is facebook more of a public space than hacker news, reddit or any public forum, message board or website where users can sign up and post content? You couldn't post a bunch of white nationalist comments here or on most other sites without getting banned. Why would and should facebook be treated differently than other websites? Having a large amount users and money doesn't suddenly make them a public entity. The fact people use their real names and identities doesn't(they're not the only site that does this). Them tracking you across multiple websites and aggregating and selling your data doesn't either. What is it about facebook that causes people to have this misconception? If this were ISP's, DNS providers, even hosting providers really shouldn't be able to(as far as i'm concerned, but that's a different discussion and does happen), but facebook doing this is the same as any other website that allows user discussions and user content setting rules. There's an internet outside of facebook. People making the choice to reside entirely there doesn't automatically make them any different than other websites. It's the users that choose to give them this power over things by using their service. Though...i know not entirely not entirely...pre installs on phones and things like the free data facebook messaging in the Philipines puts things outside.individual users control sometimes. But that's on poor government regulation and other phone manufacturers. And...i'm not a big fan of facebook. I find them shady and greatly distrust them. But, part of that is because I understand they're a shady private corporation with zero obligation to the public. Pretending otherwise is unhelpful.
- acid__ 8y ago
  One thing that I've been thinking about, and I'm curious on your thoughts on, is Facebook's "Internet.org" project. If you're not familiar, Facebook is offering low-cost (or free) internet access in less developed countries to a hand-picked selection of sites [0] and has roughly 100m users. [1] It's been argued that they're essentially acting as an ISP and are significantly violating the principles of net neutrality. [2] You say "people [are] making the choice to reside entirely there", but for millions of people around the world, Facebook is the only social media platform available to them at a reasonable cost. Should operating this platform be enough to treat them differently? I could see arguments both ways. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/internet-org-100-million/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/internet-org-100-million/ [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050446/facebook-net-neutrality-digital-colonialism-internet-org https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050446/facebook-net-neu...
rsync 8y ago
"But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything." Thank you - that is very succinctly put and is a reasonable and actionable standard that I hope more people will subscribe to. That being said, I can't imagine how difficult and frustrating it will be for facebook (and others) to police any kind of definition for "white nationalism" which seems very vague and open to all manner of misinterpretation.
wozniacki 8y ago
In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent their way. Today it's the centralized websites that also don't have this obligation. ... You are not entitled to widespread distribution. Never have been. This sort of pointing-to-the-past-to-pave-the-future is disturbing to say the least. We don't apply the received wisdom of the past blindly to issues of the present much less the future. All else being equal, the history of what was allowed to say (and what was not) in newspapers, radio or television is rife with examples of heavy handed editorializing, gate-keeper-ship, outright bias and favor and misguided attempts to selectively allow what truths are judged to be fit to be heard by the masses. Those were the dark ages for the dissemination of information. Do we really want to go back to those ages or even a shade resembling what was considered acceptable practices back then? Heck, most of that stuff happens unimpeded in large parts of the world today, as I write this. Do we want tell those countries and regions that its okay to sieve and favor what's allowed and what isn't in their public discourse, if a substantial majority of their populace finds it morally repugnant? Won't those places and people, then apply their own standards of morality in that judgment, which could be diametrically opposite to ours? Is this the example we want to set for the world to follow?
- clucas 8y ago
  So what are you advocating? That we force private entities to publish speech, and allow no recourse to enforce social norms through private action, only through government? That seems far more dystopian than the past that you are speaking out against so strongly.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    How about we force private entities in a dominant market position in any kind of information-distribution market to be common carriers?
3xblah 8y ago
"... like DNS or network connectivity." If I recall corrrectly, early in the history of the commercialisation of domain names (1990's), for a time the sole appointed registrar Network Solutions would not accept domain name registrations that contained certain "offensive" words.
DoYouEvenLFTR 8y ago
That seems reasonable. Let them set up their own website. What's that? No one wants to be a hosting provider for a bunch of neonazis? Well, they better go and set up their own hosting provider. And before you know it, you need to build an iron mine because no one wants to sell you steel for the basic infrastructure of the town you were forced to build because no one was willing to let you enter their store to even buy groceries! At what industrial level is it okay and not okay to exclude someone from that? Censorship isn't an 'answer'. Don't ask me what the answer is, though. I leave that to smarter minds.
MadWombat 8y ago
"If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it" Would you take a similar stance if Facebook banned LGBT content or YouTube kicked atheist videos off their site? I am not saying you wouldn't, but both your examples seem to be a bit one sided.
tmaly 8y ago
I think based on the outcome of this action, it has the potential to do real harm to the internet. If the current executive branch decides to get tough, they could withhold section 230 exemptions from the private companies. The net effect would be to destroy the companies platform as no company in their right mind would operate with that potential liability.
zobzu 8y ago
There's many arguments that can be had either way but the one that always resonate for me is this: Once you ban speech on any ground that isnt directly putting people in danger, even real nazis for example, they DO NOT disappear. They still recruit. They still operate. You just don't see it. The people they recruit are suddenly in a bubble where they DO NOT see the opposite view point. Their opinions become unbalanced and they become radicalized. You now have more hard-core nazis. In this case, I believe FB does this for 3 reasons: 1. many people inside FB believe in censorship and that you can forbid people to speak or think and that it makes the problem disappear. Many people in tech actually believe this. 2. FB sees this as good marketing, and good to retain eyeballs on their platform, specially vs the "we reached out and FB refused to ban nazis, FB is siding with nazis" 3. FB wants to control speech so that they can ask money when you want to be heard. Effectively, this means "media company X pays X so that their message appears more often". The more you control speech on the platform the more you can push for sources of content that will actually pay you money. Of course, these are just my opinions, and stuff.
- FireBeyond 8y ago
  > 1. many people inside FB believe in censorship and that you can forbid people to speak or think and that it makes the problem disappear. Many people in tech actually believe this. That sounds like you're making many assumptions and implications that aren't borne out by evidence. Why do you leap to this conclusion rather than: "Many people inside FB believe that they don't want the platform they've built and created to be a platform for views they feel abhorrent, and if this means that those views need to feel an alternate home, that's not their problem"?
foolinaround 8y ago
One might argue that the wide reach of platforms like youtube or FB or twitter makes them almost like root infrastructure.
schwax 8y ago
I agree. I've always been in the camp favoring freedom of speech and the marketplace of ideas. My thinking became more nuanced when I read the book Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci [0]. Changes in technology alter the playing field for culture—and we've seen this in practice as the Internet and social networking have caused a fundamental shift in what it means to censor information. Censorship used to mean putting the newspaper under state control or blockading the radio station to prevent the message getting out. Today it's much harder to censor a message by completely suppressing it. But it's also much easier to swamp the signal in noise, by flooding the communication channel with disinformation and distractions [1]. A group doesn't need to be large or powerful to muddle the truth of an issue, especially after accounting for the effects of filter bubbles and confirmation bias. So to preserve the marketplace of ideas, we need more nuanced approaches in thinking about what communication is permitted. One approach that has been gaining support is in making a distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom and reach" [2]. [0] https://www.twitterandteargas.org/ https://www.twitterandteargas.org/ [1] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-new-censorship/ https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-n... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-free-reach/ https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-f... .
mi100hael 8y ago
> You can host your own video if you'd like, or maintain a personal blog site. Making that argument would require Facebook to admit there's an internet beyond their walled garden. So far they seem happier to be grilled on national TV in front of congress than make that admission.
istherealimit 8y ago
Do you think that a website like the daily stormer should be forced off the web? And should payment processors be required to allow them an account? (for server donations, etc).
fukbezos 8y ago
I think we're all about free speech but one thing we are learning is that social media allows nearly anyone to weaponize "free speech". I don't know what we should do, if anything, but I do know social media in it's current form is not good for society. Facebook at the end of the day is a company that can do whatever they want. It would be different if the government were enforcing this.

rexpop 8y ago

I don't understand your position. The 1A is fulfilled—in word and spirit—to your satisfaction so long as government puts up no barriers to speech, even if private, quasi-monopolistic firms filter speech to their own ends?

function_seven 8y ago
I think you do understand it, yeah. The only caveat to that is the private control of what I believe to be public infrastructure. The wires that connect all of us.
- gpm 8y ago
  What makes the wire public infrastructure and facebook not? What would facebook have to do to become public infrastructure, or comcast have to do to become not?
  - ellard 8y ago
    One is contracted by the US government to provide public infrastructure (and AFAIK still hasn't fulfilled their end of the agreement), and the other is an entity that operated and grew organically to provide a service that the government didn't ask for.
    - gpm 8y ago
      Is google fiber (which, afaik, was not contracted by the government) private infrastructure in your model then? (Both yes and no are certainly valid answers, I'm just curious about how you view this)
      - ellard 8y ago
        I don't know what Google's contracts and agreements are with local municipality, so the short version of my answer is that I don't know how i'd classify Google Fiber myself. For a more general point of view, i'd take into account a lot of factors such as: - who "owns" the service, both from an "on paper" POV and who builds and maintains it - what does the contracts between the entity and the government say - did the government pay for a service to be built by the entity, vs the entity asked for permission to build the service, vs the entity built the service using non-government-permission-required resources - what was the spirit of the relationship between the entity and the government - who will be using the service - is the service a government-allowed monopoly - etc. Facebook does pass some of those tests (eg. the "public at large" is the target userbase for it), but fail a lot of the other tests at least in how they operate in the United States. Comcast's general laying out of wire + offering services over that wire passes a lot more of those tests and puts the service into public infrastructure in most folks' eyes. edit: formatting
    - Chris_Chambers 8y ago
      It doesn’t matter if it grew organically. All large social media companies should be nationalized and required to prioritize the first amendment above everything else. This nationalization should be done on principle alone as a precaution, not as a punishment. The prior owners can be happily compensated with billions from US taxpayers. Anyone should be happy to receive such an amount if it means they get to retire early, and anyone upset about it clearly had a sinister agenda to hide. Something like this will happen before 2024. I’m glad no one will see my unreadably gray comment, I’d hate to ruin the surprise.
  - 0xffff2 8y ago
    Comcast can't do anything to no longer be public infrastructure. Rather, municipalities would have to rework their regulations to allow anyone that follows a defined process to install the same infrastructure that Comcast has. Likewise, Facebook would become public infrastructure when the government puts regulations in place that make it impossible or prohibitive to start a new social media site.
    - gpm 8y ago
      That's an interesting perspective! How do patents interact with it? If facebook got a patent on some new VR technology that allowed face to face interaction at a distance, and didn't license it out, would that turn the relevant portion of facebook into public infrastructure? What if they licensed it out but only to other people who also won't serve people saying <x>?
  - lgeorget 8y ago
    Clearly not a definitive answer but some elements to think about: Facebook's business consists in promoting some of the content their users put online (the content that makes them win money) so they cannot claim to be a neutral carrier. Comcast cannot be asked to filter content since what they carry is encapsulated at least and encrypted most of the time.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    You could compare it to the street vs a private hall - everyone has the right to walk on the street, but not to automatic admittance to private venues. Now the problem is that social networks in many respect fill the old function of the 'town square' which was a common area accessible to everyone. That commons area has effectively been divided up in the name of capitalism, in parallel to the Enclosure Acts which destroyed the British commons, so now we have a large number of (private) platforms instead. There are of course protocols don't suffer from this problem of private capital and monopolistic control, but (like land for the commons) protocols without infrastructure can't compete effectively against platforms' huge network effects. The practical upshot of this is that extremist groups will usually just head for other less discriminating platforms, eg there's a lot of white supremacists on Vkontakte (though I'm not sure how this will pan out if Russia rearranges its internet connectivity with the rest of the world).
mieseratte 8y ago
"Free Speech" != 1A
- falcrist 8y ago
  Exactly. Freedom of speech isn't just freedom from government censorship. Other entities can infringe on it.
  - XorNot 8y ago
    And when you're in my house around my children you absolutely do not have it.
    - falcrist 8y ago
      Right. Freedom of speech logically cannot be unlimited for everyone at all times. That's why government protections of freedom of speech tend to be limited in scope.
mises 8y ago
His position was that government should not stifle speech, but that a private company should not be forced to re-print it. There's a big difference between prohibition/regulation and coercion of speech.

marcoperaza 8y ago

I think the interesting case is the presence of a monopolist (and I take no position here as to whether any particular company is a monopoly or not). Other [classically] liberal principles like freedom of contract have been abrogated in such cases, largely out of the realization that competition and choice are what generally make such private exercises of power acceptable.

dantheman 8y ago
Like a newspaper deciding what to publish?
- djsumdog 8y ago
  There was a time in history where everyone could start a newspaper. Pre civil war in the US, the modern day price of a printing press was $10k and almost everyone in a town would buy papers and take them on a journey across America. That's how information spread back then. By WWI, the cost in today's dollars for a newspaper grew to several million. People can't live off small papers today. They live off Patreon and YouTube. They depend on distribution platforms in a way we didn't before. If Amazon bans your books, it's effective censorship for people who only read eBooks. Sure you can distribute the epub/mobi DRM free, but few people are going to bother with that (or know what to do with the file). I've written about this before: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-censorship/ https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-...
  - xyz0 8y ago
    What? The reason starting a newspaper became so expensive is because of a much larger, national distribution model. You're still free to buy a $10k printer and sell newspapers in your hometown. If it doesn't contain hateful, violent rhetoric, you can even advertise it on Facebook! If Amazon bans your books, you can still buy the book elsewhere, or get it from the author's site. Just because a piece of information isn't in the medium that you prefer to consume doesn't make it "censorship." It's not on Amazon that "few people are going to bother with that" when they ban you for violating their ToS.

bilbo0s 8y ago

>But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything... This! A thousand times THIS! People seem to think that free speech absolutists were saying that Facebook should be forced to host extremist content. For my part, I wasn't saying anything of the sort. Facebook has rights too, and as a free speech absolutist, I will jealously defend Facebook's rights as vigorously as I defend the rights of the Nazi/Confederate/whatever you want to call them. (I think I agree with you on the "almost all" part though, because I do think pedophilia should be stamped out wherever we find it. But that's just MY line in the sand. Others may draw the line somewhere else.)

sparkie 8y ago
Facebook and others are not responsible for what their users upload and enjoy the legal protection that comes from it. If they decide that they are going to be curators of content on their platforms, they are no longer a mere service provider, but a publisher. They might find those protections vanish, which would more or less destroy their platform.
commandlinefan 8y ago
You're misunderstanding (or deliberately misrepresenting) what free-speech absolutists are saying. Nobody is saying that Facebook should be "forced" to host any particular content, any more than anybody is saying that homedepot.com should be forced to host any particular content. What we are saying is that Facebook is no longer a platform for free and open exchange of idea and is engaging in censorship - and it's open season to point out that everything that they _don't_ censor (e.g. calls for violence against politically unprotected groups) is something that they explicitly condone.
- _dczq 8y ago
  ==What we are saying is that Facebook is no longer a platform for free and open exchange of idea and is engaging in censorship== When was this ever not the case? Violent imagery and sexual nudity are already not allowed.

hhs 8y ago

Based on the evolution of the web, indeed, it looks like new businesses will be made out of this. With this banned group, I am concerned about what social scientists call the 'backfire effect', where beliefs turn even stronger and bolder. For instance, this happens with groups of people who hold conspiracy theories; when society rejects them, the conspiracy theorists double-down on their beliefs.

acjohnson55 8y ago
Good luck to them
amiga-workbench 8y ago
I think you're right. Every time you censor something you create market pressures for a way to host content that's more difficult to be taken down or traced back to a source. It's why I think censorship is self defeating, it will eventually lead to a populace being competent enough with certain tools to side step the censor, and you can't walk that back.
moosingin3space 8y ago
The key thing you're missing is recruitment. White supremacists need access to the larger platforms in order to recruit new adherents to their bigoted ideology, which is significantly harder to do if they're forced into "underground" spaces. De-platforming works -- if we make it clear that hateful ideology isn't tolerated in large platforms, then people have to actively seek out such ideologies. If such ideologies are already frowned upon in the public sphere, it makes their recruitment much more difficult.
- hhs 8y ago
  Totally agree, recruitment will be much more difficult. It's what happens to many conspiracy theorists over time. Their recruitment takes the hit in society.
- gjs278 8y ago
  The key thing you're missing is recruitment. Gloabalists need access to the larger platforms in order to recruit new adherents to their bigoted ideology, which is significantly harder to do if they're forced into "underground" spaces. De-platforming works -- if we make it clear that hateful ideology isn't tolerated in large platforms, then people have to actively seek out such ideologies. If such ideologies are already frowned upon in the public sphere, it makes their recruitment much more difficult.

Inu 8y ago

"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech." - Noam Chomsky

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Veraticus 8y ago
Facebook and YouTube are private corporations and have no obligation to platform any idea. They have the freedom to remove any content on their platforms they like, and your freedom of speech doesn't trump theirs. Of course, you can continue saying whatever it is you like -- you just have to find a platform for it yourself.
- fixermark 8y ago
  Essentially. A person's freedom of speech doesn't imply curtailment of another person's freedom of the press.
- deleted 8y ago
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bjt2n3904 8y ago
Thank you. Free speech isn't just an amendment for the government, it's a principle for society. If Facebook were a television station with limited air time for a single track, it would be perfectly valid for them to decide (reasonably) who gets air time. However, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have infinite tracks and time. I don't think the OPs argument is as strong, with that in mind.
- deleted 8y ago
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walrus01 8y ago

I am in agreement with you on this point. FB isn't obligated to give anyone a publishing platform. People with hateful, racist rhetoric are can certainly attempt to fully self host their shit content on their own servers. Essentially all they need to do is figure how how to run their own authoritative DNS servers, and their own http daemons. Various publishing CMS that work on a common LAMP stack server are GPL/BSD licensed and require no external connections to any platform services. Hopefully, ethical ISPs will refuse to host their VMs or dedicated servers, so they'll have a bit of a harder task to find a publishing platform. But if you spend 30 seconds googling "russia VPS" you can find VM services which don't even disconnect customers for hosting virus/worm/trojan/botnet command and control sites, so the racists can go there.

vokep 8y ago

I see what you mean, but it does seem different because FB or YouTube are not publications, but public forums, public communication spaces to publish as a person. Things published on youtube are not on behalf of youtube. Basically FB and Youtube and things like it form space where content fills in.

xkjkls 8y ago
> Things published on youtube are not on behalf of youtube Tell that to people using YouTube. YouTube will end up being inextricably tied to whatever content is uploaded using their platform as long as they are the ones who manage its display and recommendations.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  I think a better retort would be "tell that to 4chan".

jeffdavis 8y ago

"also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience" On social media, don't you need to find your own audience?

cortic 8y ago

>No company or platform owes them anything. This is discrimination of opinion, strange as that sounds. There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments. Its because its not allowed, we either have a list of protected groups - or a general rule that forbids banning anyone because of their 'group'. If we don't fairly quickly extend free speech into these platforms, then we will have to eventually legislate a list of protected opinions.

theseatoms 8y ago
> There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments. Could you imagine the immediate public backlash against this type of behavior by a private establishment? I don't think the law is doing the heavy lifting here.
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  There's plenty of places where there would be zero public backlash for those types of signs, if they were permitted by law.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  May I suggest reviewing the history of the civil rights movement? That sort of discrimination used to be normal in large parts of the US and was overcome through a combination of civil disobedience and legal challenges.
- Thriptic 8y ago
  The supreme court heard a court case in 2014 in which a business refused to serve people because they were gay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora... A large number of people are still alive back from when Jim Crow laws were still actively in effect. In 1957 the president had to send the 101st airborne to Arkansas to escort black children to school and seized control of the state's national guard because they were being used to block desegregation of schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine A non-trivial percentage of Americans would love to have these signs up and are kept from doing so by the law. The women's movement, LGBT rights, and minority rights are actually a fairly new thing, and are still not without controversy in the US.

ganeshkrishnan 8y ago

The paradox of tolerance is that we must always be intolerant of the intolerant. You are always FOR free speech until the speech starts hurting you. ie would you be tolerant of isis posting on FB?

r_smart 8y ago
Yes, so long as they aren't breaking the incitement to violence clause.
Fins 8y ago
This alleged "paradox" is just a convenient sledgehammer with which those in power can hit the powerless over the head to keep them quiet.
- ls612 8y ago
  No, it’s a solution to the problem that if you are tolerant of everything someone will eventually whack you with a sledgehammer. To avoid that you don’t tolerate those who are violently intolerant, which in the US takes the form of the “Imminent lawless action” doctrine.
  - Fins 8y ago
    That, actually, has nothing to do with that BS "paradox" and well predates it. Indeed, you can't do illegal things, and inflicting violence on others is generally illegal. What the "paradox" is used for is to silence those with inconvenient opinions -- if you've followed discussions of the Damore affair, "paradox" has been trotted out as justification for "punching him in the face" multiple times. But on the other hand, to use the simplest example, US is quite tolerant of speech (in the 1st amendment sense) and hasn't turned into communist or other dictatorship. USSR, or China, or Nazi Germany on the other hand did not tolerate any "intolerance" -- that did not turn out too well.
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      Indeed, you can't do illegal things, and inflicting violence on others is generally illegal. If someone is consistently threatening violence at some point you need to make the determination about how to deal with that. You can of course do nothing about it but if the person eventually goes ahead and commits violence you now have a bunch of injured or dead people, which seems a worse ill to me than deplatforming.

yummybear 8y ago

Counterpoint - if every media, platform or provider blocks the content, and the only audience you're allowed to speak freely to, is to yourself - is it still "free speech"? I'm not saying we're there yet, but we could be at some point.

XorNot 8y ago
You literally have the right to go stand on an actual soapbox outside your government offices and yell at people. That's what's constitutionally protected. No one has to pay attention though.

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908087 8y ago

Would you be similarly comfortable with ISPs or cell service providers censoring views they disagree with?

dpq 8y ago

I think your attitude is still extremely mild. It doesn't matter if we believe ourselves to be neutral, there are groups that consider themselves our opponents, and will work against everything we stand for. And, unless we decide to fight back or at least stop helping them to promote their agenda (which is often incompatible with values widely shared among secular / educated communities), they will prevail in some manner. See also: 2016 U.S. election.

azangru 8y ago
> to promote their agenda > ... > they will prevail in some manner. As it takes two to tango, so does it take two sides to promote something: one that is doing the promotion and the other that is following the promoter. If the argument is that people are so fickle they will eat up whatever is being directed at them, join the ranks of the promoters, who will thus prevail, then woe upon us. I prefer to think of ourselves as somewhat more capable of resisting insane and malicious messages.

conanbatt 8y ago

Thats fine, but how does the line blur when Facebook takes government money in the form of subsidies and political ads?

erentz 8y ago

> * Which leads to a place where I'll agree on obligations: root infrastructure like DNS or network connectivity. Those are the common carriers of our Internet. And payment processors, and credit card companies, and mobile carriers, and instant messaging providers.

ryukafalz 8y ago
I’d agree with all of those except instant messaging providers. The others involve massive capital investments to replace them at all; a small IM server can be run on a $5 VPS.

closeparen 8y ago

The town library is not required to carry every book. Librarians make curation decisions; that is what we pay them for. It is still a tragedy when small groups of activist Puritanical community members get enough political leverage to remove the books they don’t like. The reason it’s a tragedy is not unrelated to “free speech.”

asabjorn 8y ago

Why do they have the right to use power to suppress viewpoint opponents with 100% flexibility in claiming an individual has wronged a group with no evidence, no clear definition of what the terms are, and no recourse? It seems like terms like this and hate speech often boil down to “people that are effective at calling out my bullshit”. It is unethical to with no evidence call republicans or classical liberals Nazis, and then use that as a justification to abuse your power to shut them up. Why not make an argument instead? On this topic I really recommend Frankfurts [1] terse one hour read arguing that there are three types of statements; attempt at truth, attempt at lies, and attempt to just bullshit people with no regard to relate it to truth. This kind of attempt fall in the third category. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946 https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122...

asabjorn 8y ago
It is quite telling how this is getting downvoted with no argument. Always judge people on their actions, and especially how their actions impose upon others. Edit: and then this is also downvoted with no argument. A better demonstration of why this facebook policy is a terrible idea could have not happened.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  It's not a novel argument, it begs the question from the outset (boil down to “people that are effective at calling out my bullshit”), and ignores objective evidence about the content and aims of the speech in question.
  - asabjorn 8y ago
    Bullshitting is what many talking heads do on TV, YouTube and tumbler to generate content required for their job. Basically, truth seeking has not done its job on it so the person doesn’t know if it’s true or not. People are right now most often in a biased content bubble and judging content from what they learn by emotionally mistaking what they learn from possibly bullshit content as objective might lead to injustice. Most of us agree that people might say bad things and that it would be great if they didn’t, but my claims was that facebooks judgement of the content is unlikely to be objective because: 1) no clear definition of terms like white nationalism and hate speech is a recipe for bias. What liberal or republican haven’t been called a alt-right/Nazi at this point? 2) because of #1 there is a risk that a company that has a clear ideological tilt will most likely end up suppressing viewpoint opponents when the definitions are unclear, because too much is up to subjective judgement and no due process protects against these biases 3) no recourse is bad when things go wrong In due process it’s the process that reduce bias so that we don’t get the mistakes of mobs of the past (eg people that think they are objective while not having an accurate mental model of what they judge), although it can’t eliminate it. How do you think facebook has ameliorated these concerns so that they can be objective?

wang_li 8y ago

The question here isn't whether Facebook/Twitter/etc. have a right to control what is on their platform, they absolutely do. The question is whether there should be safe harbor provisions that protect them from legal repercussions of what they do choose to allow on their sites. A case can be made to protect someone who allows all comers, who increases the reach of the public to communicate with each other, and who extends the scope of public discourse to be protected from the legal consequences of what their users say. The same case is a lot harder to apply to an institution that curates the content they choose to publish. By way of comparison, telephone carriers, an industry that exerts no editorial control, are largely not legally liable for what customers say over the phone network. Newspaper publishers, who have absolute editorial control, on the other hand are legally responsible for what they publish. Which of these are Facebook and Twitter? My answer is that the more they limit speech that is not legally criminal then the more liability they should have for what they allow.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
The problem is that, for a paper or a TV network, control scales. You can pump your network TV signal out twice as many antennas, and still control every frame of video. For the telephone network, control does not scale. There is no way for the phone company to censor what happens in one billion daily phone calls. It can't be done (until we get adequate speech recognition, but that's not an answer that I want to see applied in this way). Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are like the phone company, not like newspapers and TV. Censorship does not scale. Twitter, being text, could think about trying to automate censorship. The problem is that people do all kinds of typos, circumlocutions, innuendo, and dog whistles to get around such things. Words are really flexible, so it's a hard problem. Facebook and YouTube are worse. They can try to have automatic assists, but pretty much the only way it can be done is via user reporting. Even that doesn't scale all that well.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

I tend to agree. I think the main argument against that can be made is that the Internet is now so complex that the forbidden speech can easily be silenced entirely, if you start your own blog independent of FB. Especially with DDoS attacks, it can become prohibitively expensive to stop those and the core/root internet infrastructure simply doesn’t stop it. It’s basically a paid add-on and if you want to do it yourself you will need both funding and/or technical expertise. Either way, I’m still in support of Facebook and others removing this type of speech as I think it’s a net negative to society to amplify it in this day of discovery algorithms. Seems like we also need to do more to improve the core infrastructure so that you don’t need 5Tbps of bandwidth to keep your blog online.

threatofrain 8y ago

Similarly, Fox News isn't required to carry content they don't want to, and their political reach is enormous.

txsoftwaredev 8y ago
And CNN, MSNBC, Vox, HuffPost, Slate, The Guardian etc. are not required to carry content that doesn't align with their political agenda. I'm not sure I understand your point? With media outlets there are plenty of alternatives. There are no direct alternatives to Facebook that provide the same services at that scale and reach.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  Why do scale and reach matter?

1000units 8y ago

This is obviously part of a much larger campaign to silence disagreeable speech. You aren't a "free speech absolutist" if you aren't alarmed by this. You admit that people have a right to use of "root infrastructure", but registrars and hosts are already discriminating against people for legally protected speech. PS: Observe the downvotes without comment. These are the adherents to the school of thought that advocates not caring about reasoning with people who disagree with you. Everything is simply a bare power struggle in which considerate words are not the weapons of choice.

Not_a_pizza 8y ago

> If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it. Will they get rid of Mark Zuckerberg? If there is any single bigot driving that company into the ground with both illegal practices and bigotry, it's him.

ineedasername 8y ago

> No company or platform owes them anything. Precisely. I worked on a college newspaper. It was common , had been going on for years and years in face, that a specific hate group would send an order for advertisements, and threaten to sue if we didn't print them. They were usually Holocaust denial ads w/ anti-semitic conspiracy theories. We never printed them, but some schools inevitably did, failing to understand this aspect of free speech. Everyone gets to speak. But if you want a microphone, you have to buy or build it yourself.

alexandre_m 8y ago
Bad example. The college newspaper acts as an editor and has to review what content to publish before it's being published. The college will be held responsible if there's misinformation or something of criminal nature being shared. FB pretends to be a medium of information for anyone and they don't moderate what is being published before being published. They do however have an obligation for content being distributed after if it's breaking the ToS or the laws. They have to take that down after the fact. Here the controversy as I see it, is to prevent a group from publishing if it's been labeled as "hate", or "white supremacist" content, where the labeling aspect is very subjective and arbitrary. Who's to decide the labeling?
- ineedasername 8y ago
  > The college will be held responsible if there's misinformation or something of criminal nature being shared. This is precisely the dynamic that is driving facebook. I don't think the comparison to a newspaper is perfect, but I do think it's apt. In both cases, neither venue is obligated to give anyone their own soapbox to stand on. That was my point.
  - alexandre_m 8y ago
    The problem with FB is they want all the benefits of a platform without any of the drawbacks. Or rather, it's the public perception of what FB should be and FB is stuck in the middle juggling with politics. Obviously if you're a shareholder then you want to play it cool with the medias and portray a good image of the company. I just think it's bad policy.

marricks 8y ago

I agree with the spirit of this totally, if I run a coffee shop I sure as heck would kick out white nationalists and would support other coffee shops having that ability. There’s a weird side to this though that if you want to host a video let’s say YouTube is the place for it. Or if you want to organize a group Facebook is THE place for it. Well what if your group is about shutting down Facebook? Facebook could close it. Heck FB took down Elizabeth Warren’s post critiquing FB. I think these mega corps need to be broken up so they don’t get so much power in deciding what is and isn’t allowed on the internet. Sure they make good choices like this one but they also make tons of other choices that are only because it benefits them.

JonesWilly 8y ago
I like your comment, I only disagree with the word "spirit". I believe this policy is a slippery slope. No one likes these groups but alienating them, creates a precedent/a policy that legitimizes removal of the one element of our existence that allows for our individuality(spirit). Silence of that which we loathe is failure to embrace our own capacity for loathsome behavior. We all like and dislike different elements in our life. I am a married man; is this not discriminatory to the rest of society. When a corporate entity profits this much off the indoctrination of public, they should be obligated to enforce the tenants of said republic. “It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.” “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,

ataturk 8y ago

Why now? After all, we've had all this supposed white supremacist content available all these years and now it's somehow a threat? Are more white people getting fed up being the tax cows of the world or what?

superkuh 8y ago

You're right. The correct solution is for everyone to stop using the services providing by companies when they begin the downwards censorship slide. Unfortunately most people value using facebook in the >$1000/year range.

prepend 8y ago

What about the post office refusing to deliver letters? Or the phone company? How about no heat for nazis from the gas company? It using the gas company’s platform to heat your racist meeting place allowed? Facebook is a Privately Owned Public Place more than it is a platform.

justinmchase 8y ago

I think if they allow public signups then they should not have the ability to censor anybody, except by court order or to comply with the laws of the users region. Because of course "anything I don't agree with is hitler" is a problem and an inevitability. Its fine if they do not allow public sign ups and all people they are publishing are considered employees or enter into contract with the company but facebook, twitter etc. are different animals and I really don't see how anybody supporting free speech can support facebook inhibiting the speech of certain people.

simias 8y ago
By doing that you're effectively turning these websites into 4chan. Can you imagine a website like Hacker News if no moderation was possible, nobody could get banned and nothing could be removed without a court order? You'd just have every thread spammed by bots. That's the problem with unmoderated online discourse, cheap inflammatory posts are easy to make and draw a lot of attention while in-depth analysis takes time to write and to read. Why bother coming up with a clever retort if you can just spam "no u" and "fuck off" until those people are driven away? In my experience no moderation doesn't result in more varied opinions, instead it turns into an echo chamber where the bullies take over. Again, look at 4chan or some of the most popular, less moderated subreddits. It's pretty crap.
- int_19h 8y ago
  The ideal state of affairs is when you can have multiple platforms, moderated in different ways as they compete for customers in a free (i.e. competitive) market, where such moderation, or lack thereof, is a part of their pitch to new customers. But we let companies monopolize whole segments of the market. And then every such segment becomes a vast echo chamber of whatever the prevailing public opinion at the moment is.

cynoclast 8y ago

>I consider myself a free speech absolutist. Or very nearly so. You're not. You're a coward.

beat 8y ago

I am no longer a free speech absolutist. And the reason I am not is the sort of abstract, angels-on-a-pinhead bullshit arguments that fill the responses to the parent post. The more it can be abstracted to "free speech", the less oxygen there is for discussion of the real harm caused by white supremacist thought and white supremacist actions. I put the safety of society at large first. And if you think that's oppressing you, maybe you should ask yourself why.

dqpb 8y ago
Who do you propose gets to decide what speech is dangerous?
- beat 8y ago
  That's a disingenuous question. Let me come back with some questions about your question. Are you proposing that nobody can decide what speech is dangerous? Are you suggesting there is no such thing as dangerous speech? Are you suggesting that having someone decide what speech is dangerous is actually worse than the dangerous speech itself? If you're not suggesting any of these things, then how do you get out of the proposition that someone has decide?
  - gjs278 8y ago
    there is no such thing as dangerous speech
  - dqpb 8y ago
    It's not disingenuous - it's the most fundamental question that needs to be answered if you propose speech be controlled. > how do you get out of the proposition that someone has to decide I agree ultimately some subset of people would need to decide. My question is who?
    - XorNot 8y ago
      You clearly have done answer in mind since you've already conceded the core argument. Who do you think? I'm good with the discourse between the public and Facebook leadership in so far as it targets widespread social norms and ignores the few loudmouths.

grawprog 8y ago

I'm going to respond to this comment because my response is just kind of in general to the whole conversation this spawned. In what way is facebook more of a public space than hacker news, reddit or any public forum, message board or website where users can sign up and post content? You couldn't post a bunch of white nationalist comments here or on most other sites without getting banned. Why would and should facebook be treated differently than other websites? Having a large amount users and money doesn't suddenly make them a public entity. The fact people use their real names and identities doesn't(they're not the only site that does this). Them tracking you across multiple websites and aggregating and selling your data doesn't either. What is it about facebook that causes people to have this misconception? If this were ISP's, DNS providers, even hosting providers really shouldn't be able to(as far as i'm concerned, but that's a different discussion and does happen), but facebook doing this is the same as any other website that allows user discussions and user content setting rules. There's an internet outside of facebook. People making the choice to reside entirely there doesn't automatically make them any different than other websites. It's the users that choose to give them this power over things by using their service. Though...i know not entirely not entirely...pre installs on phones and things like the free data facebook messaging in the Philipines puts things outside.individual users control sometimes. But that's on poor government regulation and other phone manufacturers. And...i'm not a big fan of facebook. I find them shady and greatly distrust them. But, part of that is because I understand they're a shady private corporation with zero obligation to the public. Pretending otherwise is unhelpful.

acid__ 8y ago
One thing that I've been thinking about, and I'm curious on your thoughts on, is Facebook's "Internet.org" project. If you're not familiar, Facebook is offering low-cost (or free) internet access in less developed countries to a hand-picked selection of sites [0] and has roughly 100m users. [1] It's been argued that they're essentially acting as an ISP and are significantly violating the principles of net neutrality. [2] You say "people [are] making the choice to reside entirely there", but for millions of people around the world, Facebook is the only social media platform available to them at a reasonable cost. Should operating this platform be enough to treat them differently? I could see arguments both ways. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/internet-org-100-million/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/internet-org-100-million/ [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050446/facebook-net-neutrality-digital-colonialism-internet-org https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050446/facebook-net-neu...

rsync 8y ago

"But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything." Thank you - that is very succinctly put and is a reasonable and actionable standard that I hope more people will subscribe to. That being said, I can't imagine how difficult and frustrating it will be for facebook (and others) to police any kind of definition for "white nationalism" which seems very vague and open to all manner of misinterpretation.

wozniacki 8y ago

In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent their way. Today it's the centralized websites that also don't have this obligation. ... You are not entitled to widespread distribution. Never have been. This sort of pointing-to-the-past-to-pave-the-future is disturbing to say the least. We don't apply the received wisdom of the past blindly to issues of the present much less the future. All else being equal, the history of what was allowed to say (and what was not) in newspapers, radio or television is rife with examples of heavy handed editorializing, gate-keeper-ship, outright bias and favor and misguided attempts to selectively allow what truths are judged to be fit to be heard by the masses. Those were the dark ages for the dissemination of information. Do we really want to go back to those ages or even a shade resembling what was considered acceptable practices back then? Heck, most of that stuff happens unimpeded in large parts of the world today, as I write this. Do we want tell those countries and regions that its okay to sieve and favor what's allowed and what isn't in their public discourse, if a substantial majority of their populace finds it morally repugnant? Won't those places and people, then apply their own standards of morality in that judgment, which could be diametrically opposite to ours? Is this the example we want to set for the world to follow?

clucas 8y ago
So what are you advocating? That we force private entities to publish speech, and allow no recourse to enforce social norms through private action, only through government? That seems far more dystopian than the past that you are speaking out against so strongly.
- int_19h 8y ago
  How about we force private entities in a dominant market position in any kind of information-distribution market to be common carriers?

3xblah 8y ago

"... like DNS or network connectivity." If I recall corrrectly, early in the history of the commercialisation of domain names (1990's), for a time the sole appointed registrar Network Solutions would not accept domain name registrations that contained certain "offensive" words.

DoYouEvenLFTR 8y ago

That seems reasonable. Let them set up their own website. What's that? No one wants to be a hosting provider for a bunch of neonazis? Well, they better go and set up their own hosting provider. And before you know it, you need to build an iron mine because no one wants to sell you steel for the basic infrastructure of the town you were forced to build because no one was willing to let you enter their store to even buy groceries! At what industrial level is it okay and not okay to exclude someone from that? Censorship isn't an 'answer'. Don't ask me what the answer is, though. I leave that to smarter minds.

MadWombat 8y ago

"If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it" Would you take a similar stance if Facebook banned LGBT content or YouTube kicked atheist videos off their site? I am not saying you wouldn't, but both your examples seem to be a bit one sided.

tmaly 8y ago

I think based on the outcome of this action, it has the potential to do real harm to the internet. If the current executive branch decides to get tough, they could withhold section 230 exemptions from the private companies. The net effect would be to destroy the companies platform as no company in their right mind would operate with that potential liability.

zobzu 8y ago

There's many arguments that can be had either way but the one that always resonate for me is this: Once you ban speech on any ground that isnt directly putting people in danger, even real nazis for example, they DO NOT disappear. They still recruit. They still operate. You just don't see it. The people they recruit are suddenly in a bubble where they DO NOT see the opposite view point. Their opinions become unbalanced and they become radicalized. You now have more hard-core nazis. In this case, I believe FB does this for 3 reasons: 1. many people inside FB believe in censorship and that you can forbid people to speak or think and that it makes the problem disappear. Many people in tech actually believe this. 2. FB sees this as good marketing, and good to retain eyeballs on their platform, specially vs the "we reached out and FB refused to ban nazis, FB is siding with nazis" 3. FB wants to control speech so that they can ask money when you want to be heard. Effectively, this means "media company X pays X so that their message appears more often". The more you control speech on the platform the more you can push for sources of content that will actually pay you money. Of course, these are just my opinions, and stuff.

FireBeyond 8y ago
> 1. many people inside FB believe in censorship and that you can forbid people to speak or think and that it makes the problem disappear. Many people in tech actually believe this. That sounds like you're making many assumptions and implications that aren't borne out by evidence. Why do you leap to this conclusion rather than: "Many people inside FB believe that they don't want the platform they've built and created to be a platform for views they feel abhorrent, and if this means that those views need to feel an alternate home, that's not their problem"?

foolinaround 8y ago

One might argue that the wide reach of platforms like youtube or FB or twitter makes them almost like root infrastructure.

schwax 8y ago

I agree. I've always been in the camp favoring freedom of speech and the marketplace of ideas. My thinking became more nuanced when I read the book Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci [0]. Changes in technology alter the playing field for culture—and we've seen this in practice as the Internet and social networking have caused a fundamental shift in what it means to censor information. Censorship used to mean putting the newspaper under state control or blockading the radio station to prevent the message getting out. Today it's much harder to censor a message by completely suppressing it. But it's also much easier to swamp the signal in noise, by flooding the communication channel with disinformation and distractions [1]. A group doesn't need to be large or powerful to muddle the truth of an issue, especially after accounting for the effects of filter bubbles and confirmation bias. So to preserve the marketplace of ideas, we need more nuanced approaches in thinking about what communication is permitted. One approach that has been gaining support is in making a distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom and reach" [2]. [0] https://www.twitterandteargas.org/ https://www.twitterandteargas.org/ [1] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-new-censorship/ https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-n... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-free-reach/ https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-f... .

mi100hael 8y ago

> You can host your own video if you'd like, or maintain a personal blog site. Making that argument would require Facebook to admit there's an internet beyond their walled garden. So far they seem happier to be grilled on national TV in front of congress than make that admission.

istherealimit 8y ago

Do you think that a website like the daily stormer should be forced off the web? And should payment processors be required to allow them an account? (for server donations, etc).

fukbezos 8y ago

I think we're all about free speech but one thing we are learning is that social media allows nearly anyone to weaponize "free speech". I don't know what we should do, if anything, but I do know social media in it's current form is not good for society. Facebook at the end of the day is a company that can do whatever they want. It would be different if the government were enforcing this.